Can the surveillance state be fun? You might think so after visiting Hansel & Gretel at the Park Avenue Armory. A collaboration between international starchitects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Hansel & Gretel (after the children’s fairy tale), resembles an immersive version of the dystopian TV show, Person of Interest—minus any interest in dystopia. A marriage of spy satellite and photo booth, Hansel & Gretel entertains with gee-whiz technology and video-game atmospherics while forgetting to provide any sense of what it actually means to be watched 24/7.
You enter the Armory’s darkened Drill Hall to find an illuminated network of red lines projected onto the floor, which you follow while being tracked by infrared sensors and camera-equipped drones buzzing above you. Each move produces a high-tech version of the bread-crumb trail from the original story: A ghostly overhead image of your body appearing behind you. Other than providing Instagrammable moments, there doesn’t seem to be any point to this. Likewise, CCTV cameras feed images of your face onto giant flatscreens for no real purpose other than showing what you’d look like while robbing a convenience store.
Hansel & Gretel is a massive exercise in tone deafness masquerading as political critique by elite artists whose status as brands is supported by the very system they target. Perhaps there’s no way around this fundamental paradox of how the global culture industry operates, but there must be a better way than using the invasion of privacy to create a high-cultural amusement park.